SO, I spent an hour and a half replying to this only to forget that Tumblr has a save feature and it get eaten, thrown out into the void, etc., so after crying for a while let me try to recover as much as I can from memory! It’s not going to be nearly as eloquent as what I had before— it may have been the best thing I’ve written on here— but it should get the idea across!
As much as I love Legs or Owen being a mentor, I’d love it even more if they were both in the game with Apo. Let me explain.
A year after she survives the massacre that was the Fernsfield arena, Apo finds herself reaped. Again. Because this year, contestants are pulled from the pool of winners. Legundo just wants to help people survive as long as he can. He wants to help. (Is this just a ploy to get people to trust him?) (He’s too self-sacrificial for that to work as a marketing tactic, unfortunately. His team tries to frame it that way to spectacularly bad results.) With the cast of characters before us, it very quickly goes from a death game into more one of politics. Who will betray who? Who’ll be the first to crack? Tensions are high.
This au leans heavily into the cult nature. Scott is feared and ruthless and charming and sweet, and with the carnage that Scott left in the wake of his victory, Owen forms an alliance with him to kill as many people as possible. Scott manipulates Pyro, guilting him about Czeslaw yet praising his potential, and threatening to drown him if he doesn’t obey. Shelby stays in ‘town’ longer than the rest of ‘the coven’ after they’ve split off, but the rising tensions means she feels safer staying with a small group of people who seem to care about her than a whole lot of highly skilled strangers who seem about to turn on each other. At first there’s one faction as everyone works together, feeling each other out, but they don’t last long as a single unit.
Individual breakdown time! I love this bit!
Shelby won her game accidentally. It really was just coincidence, there was no skill involved, and nobody in the town respects her because of it. She’s sweet, and gullible, and not as much of a burden as everyone thinks. She’s sharp and, under Scott, refined into a weapon, should she want to strike. Not being able to hurt someone and choosing not to are very different things. They’ve been alone a lot— her Dad left to do something great right after they won her game— and she’s the one who convinces everyone during training to keep a truce and form a settlement at the start. She knows they’re in a death game. She understands that people are afraid! People are generally reasonable, it’s just fear and a lack of understanding that’s making them think she’s dangerous for being around Scott. Scott’s nice! Yeah, he’s scary if you don’t get to know him, but he hasn’t killed anyone yet! (This time.) (She never killed anyone.) And… Maybe they can all win. Maybe if they all trust each other completely and refuse to hurt each other, they’ll all be let go. That’s good television, right? Everyone loves an underdog story!
It just… doesn’t work out that way.
Apo won her game by… doing what she had to to get back to Cherri. When reaped again, she knows they have to win. But everyone is cooperating, and v!Apo both genuinely cares so much about others and has canonically anti-establishment undertones, so they are fully on board with sticking it to the Capital and working together. Which is made a lot harder by whatever double-crossing Cleo is doing!
(I’ll go into more detail for Apo later, this is just baseline motivations)
Cleo won their game after being enslaved by the male counterpart from her district. It came down to a final three with Alaric, herself, and a third person. The two of them took each other out and she ended up winning because of it. They know how to be compliant and quiet and play by the rules, which ultimately means that nobody knows how cunning she can be. (They’re done with playing ‘fairly’. None of this is fair, deal with it.) After winning, she went home to their district to find her people in shock. They’d been expecting, hoping, for their victor to be Alaric, and had cheered him on in everything he’d put them through. She has no loyalty for the home that has no loyalty for her, and is playing purely for their survival, and for the survival of Pearl.
I’m not sure yet if they knew each other beforehand, since victors have certain responsibilities that may mean they spend time together. Either way, star-crossed moonrot!
Abolish works in the shadows and the background. He won his game by turning people against each other and leading them into traps with such subtlety that even the audience chalked it up to a series of luck. He’s shown that he can survive, but no extraordinary skill. Morcant is, and was, his mentor, having brought him up after the death of his parents from their work in the rebellion against the Capital. Being in the rebellion, being reaped was annoying; he’s an asset but winning would shine a spotlight on him, and thus, what he works for and what he does. Winning in a way that made people ignore him was hard and tedious. Being reaped a second time was not just inconvenient, but rude. He came into this expecting to have to let himself die (since he’d be trapped in here with people no ordinary victor could take down) but really hoping he didn’t have to. When everyone agreed to work together, however, he saw an opportunity. Stay overlooked while keeping as many people allied and alive as long as possible until the rebellion can break them out and start a revolution. It’s a tricky balance— there are more keen eyes on THIS game than ever before— but he’s here to do a job, and a job he’s going to do.
Pearl is Katniss Everdeen but with more whimsy. Their impending doom is part of why she’s so determined to find joy in the little things. Dying is one thing, dying miserable is another and something she’d really like to avoid! Like Katniss, she’s a hunter. Back home, she’s self-sufficient and no-contact with her family, so being so relied upon to feed everyone is a nice change of pace. With her hunting skills and Cleo’s farming, they work together a lot to prepare food and supplies. (If it weren’t for Pearl, Cleo probably would’ve taken a leaf out of Legundo’s book and poisoned the cookpot ages ago, but that would be a big betrayal Pearl would not forgive.) She’s optimistic but reasonable, and a fan-favourite because of her silliness and prowess! She won her previous game after being ganged up on and swiftly taking them all out, and mostly acted in self-defence, always trying to merciful. Pearl’s used to people wanting something from her— more than her fare share with her family, then attention and money as a victor, and now… now..?— but she’s honestly used to it, and cares less about it than she used to. She’s all about doing the best with what she has.
Losing Elle, his best friend and female counterpart from their district the year she should’ve won, really messed Avid up. Being reaped a second time was the final straw for his mental health. Given his situation the paranoia and unwitting manipulation is justified, but not helpful.
Drift is a coward. She is also a survivor. These aren’t mutually exclusive.
In her game, everyone worked together, much like in the current one. It was very much a murder mystery. ‘Play along at home!’ It was a great year for betting, since the identity of the blue orchid killer was obscured. They were a close-knit group, and one of them was a murderer. Somehow, even with someone on watch, people kept dying, and the murderer left a flower as a calling card with every corpse. The hope was that it would get easier to identify the culprit as more and more people were picked off. The hope was that it wouldn’t be her.
Drift was the main investigator of the bunch. One day, she received a blue orchid. She wasn’t dead yet, but the message was clear: she would be, soon.
So she ran. And the murders stopped. It was obvious! Of course the killer was the detective, she’d been covering her tracks! The people at home were delighted, and she got a LOT of sponsors and attention. Everyone teamed up to chase her down and ‘relieve her guilty conscience’, but her mentor had sent her a bomb. She deployed it cleverly, killing everyone and crowning her the victor.
Explosives were banned the next year.
It was left ambiguous who the killer really was (the Capital returned the bets, to much disappointment). She really didn’t do it. But that wasn’t good for publicity. After being reaped a second time, though, she finally got to be adamant that she was framed.
(Does it really matter, though? She’s only telling the truth because it makes her less of a target. It’s the first time she’s been glad that people might think that she’s a murderer because it suggests that she’s not necessarily someone you want to cross, whilst also not being a threat.)
She never got any closure. She can only hope that this time works out differently.
Anyway, yeah! Here’s half the cast! My og mountain of text was longer and probably better professed, but I hope this gives an insight into where I’m going with it— I’ll hopefully get to the other half soon, and maybe think about how the plot would go down? 👀 The hunger games is SUCH a fitting setting for these characters. Yes! Put them into a torment game canonically
Give thoughts, I want to eat them :)
